Posted
by
timothyon Sunday February 23, 2014 @04:00PM
from the one-hand-tied-behind-your-back dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting project underway to recreate the ZX Spectrum and more. The Bluetooth ZX Spectrum has been successfully crowdfunded, and it is due to go on sale in September 2014. If you want to go back to the 1980s — to the wonderful era of 8-bit gaming, you can instead try one of the many ZX Spectrum emulators." I remember being excited at the new Sinclair when my dad brought it home, but my strongest memory now is of what might be the worst keyboard I've ever had the chance to use.

The article doesn't even appear to mention the official page of the crowdfunding campaign, which is this Kickstarter campaign [kickstarter.com]. It turns out not to be a hardware recreation of the Spectrum's logic, just a rubber keyboard for use with emulators.

If you want to build a modern recreation of the Speccy (absolutely timing perfect too) there's a clone called the Harlequin which was designed by a guy who recently reverse engineered the ZX Spectrum's Ferranti ULA and wrote a book about it. The book's great:

1. It's not a Bluetooth ZX Spectrum, but a Bluetooth ZX Spectrum *keyboard*;

2. It's not even a generic keyboard, but a keyboard that is only guaranteed to work with "Elite official applications";

3. Most of these "Elite official applications" have been removed from AppStore, some of them due to unpaid royalties, others for copyright infringment - thus there's a change owners of the keyboard may not have any applications to use after all;

4. Unpaid game developers are currently trying to cancel this Kickstarter campaign, since the premise of a Spectrum-like keyboard to play licensed games is false - several games that Elite released on mobile were never licensed at all, others were licensed but never paid;

5. This "news" is about 3 weeks old, as you can see from the following links:

No, on the Spectrum each keyword had its own key. Keywords, even operators like <= were stored as single bytes with codepoints above 0xA0. This made for more efficient storage of programs. In comparison, on the VIC-20 keywords were stored literally, but you could abbreviate them, e.g. ? for PRINT or pO for POKE. Of course this wasn't how it appeared on the screen. On the screen an abbreviated GOSUB would be GO[heart], and you had to RTFM [archive.org] to find out that GO-heart means GOSUB. I found the Spectrum's solution much more elegant. But of course I had to because I had a Spectrum and there was a religious war going on.